Wildwood days
“Watch the tram car please…watch the tram car please…”
Anyone who recognizes the amplified sound of those words echoing through summer crowds on the 2.5 mile boardwalk has spent some summer vacations in Wildwood, New Jersey…most likely several years of summer vacations and across generations. The 1950s neon signs and motel architecture, the longest walk across the sand to reach the ocean, and the multi-generational family vacationers basking in the hot sun.
From my early childhood days, I remember the sleepless nights before our departure filled with excitement of being there and anticipatory anxiety of getting there. The dread of the crowded, hot, loud subway ride the next morning to get my grandma, my mom, my two sisters and me to Port Authority on the pre-Disney 42nd Street of the 70s and 80s in Manhattan. The tension and clenching, racing heart, catastrophic thoughts pulsing through me as we descended the concrete steps onto the subway platform. Holding my breath each time we paused in a dark tunnel, praying we would not get stuck and the lights would stop flickering off and on.
A feeling of survival as we walked up the steps into the Port Authority bus terminal. Fighting our way through the crowds, we found our gate. I could feel the anxiety gradually dissipating and the excitement washing over its shadows. Placing my luggage under the bus, walking up into the cold air-conditioned bus with the huge tinted windows, I searched for my perfect window seat. Easing into the large fluffy seat, placing my Walkman headphones onto my ears, with a cassette of my favorite music, I felt the joy of escape coming my way.
As the bus pulled out of the depot and drove down the familiar descending spirals, my anxiety drifted downward across the 4-hour drive to Wildwood Crest, where we would land safely into our two rooms at the Aztec Motel.
Much like my children’s experiences in later years, my sisters and I would spend days playing in sand at the beach, jumping the waves, and swimming in the motel pool, where I learned my doggy paddle swimming skills that I still have not mastered beyond. Also like my children, our biggest excitement lay in walking the boardwalk at night. All the bright lights of the three amusement parks, the warm lights of the stores calling us in to see all the souvenirs and funny t-shirts and hoodies of the season. Playing water shooting games for the popular giant stuffed animals of that summer still is one of my favorites. Hours spent in arcades earning tickets for prizes to be chosen on the last night. Carefully scoping out all the treasures in the shops to choose that one special keepsake of the year.
Boarding the tram car at the very end of the pier with aching soles on our feet, warm skin from the sun of that day, and a wavy feeling from the ocean’s rhythm, again carefully selecting the just right bench seat. Wanting the ride to last forever, watching all the people, the shops, and feeling the breeze from the adjacent ocean, inhaling the warm salty air. Resting my young head on my grandma’s shoulder, holding my child on my adult lap, or leaning into my lover’s arms…the sound of “Watch the tram car please” in a distant background as I inhaled the time, the space and the love of who I was with across a span of over forty years so far.
Although some minor changes, like how as kids we used to wait on a line to use the one public pay phone across the street from the Aztec, stocked up with quarters, to call Grandpa and tell him how our trip was going. Or how my kids use an electronic arcade card to play games and amass points, whereas we used quarters and collected paper tickets. So much stays the same. It’s like Wildwood holds time still in this place of kitschy nostalgia, which is what keeps the place thriving from people willing to pay ridiculously high prices for 50s motels with hard beds in dated spaces. Trying to grasp at past memories while creating new ones through multiple lifespans of family.
This summer, the joy and escape is mixed with sadness and loss as I experience Wildwood for my first time as a single mom with my two children. On our first boardwalk night, I felt such longing for my husband of twenty-four years, mixed with the deepest hurt by him and a dread of the impending divorce ahead.
As I smiled through the kids’ shopping and excitement, I kept my eye on that long tram ride back to the motel at the end of the night. As we reached the end of the pier, empty tram cars passed us by saying no more rides for tonight. Like a dam, I burst into tears. Trying so hard to hold it in for my kids, I could not. I gave them money to go in and buy more gifts for their girlfriends. My 22-year-old tried flagging down tram workers on the running cars to see if there was anything he could do. After offering to run the 2.5 miles to bring the car back for me, we sat together on a shiny new blue metal bench replacing the old wooden benches of my childhood.
I sobbed over my lost marriage and our fractured family. Then I stood up, looked down at the 2.5 mile stretch, the crowds, the bright lights, and walked alongside my precious kids, with my aching feet, straight through my thoughts of “I can’t do this, I can’t make it,” and I made it.
The next day, I fully engaged with my kids at the ocean, swam with them in the pool, rested in our motel beds. I shot water into targets and won my daughter a stuffed seagull with a slice of pepperoni pizza in its mouth and my son a stuffed shark he had been eyeing. I won a game of Deal or No Deal with my son, and ate some ice cream with them. And then, I sat between both my children on a yellow and blue bench seat riding across the night sky boardwalk to our motel room together.